A recent article in the Wall Street Journal claims that there is a level of conflict of interest for bloggers who have advised FON and are writing about it. While the Journal’s story, in itself, is probably more of a tempest in a tea cup, I do believe that it raises some interesting issues in terms of buzz in the blogosphere. The New Gatekeepers For all that is being said about the democratizing effect of the blogosphere, the truth is that systems of hierarchies that have existed for thousands of years still exist in the online world. It may be that humans are hard-wired for hierarchies and find an innate need to give more power to a certain amount of gatekeepers. In the past, access to information was directly tied to monetary fortune. Before the advent of the printing press, books were very expensive so, as a result, the knowledge that was transferred through books was only accessible to one of two groups: rich people, knights and other people with some type of royal title, and religious leaders, including the people in monasteries who created those books. As a result, the information traded via books was largely centered on the…